Savoca

Savoca sits on a hill above the Ionian coast, fifteen kilometers north of Taormina. The medieval village is known for two things. First, the Capuchin convent below the centro storico holds the Catacombe dei Cappuccini, with thirty-seven mummified bodies of notables from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, preserved in a colatoio that desiccated the corpses with vinegar and salt.

Second, in the summer of 1971 Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo arrived to film the Sicilian scenes of The Godfather: the original Corleone, in the Palermo province, was deemed too modern. The thirteenth-century Chiesa di San Nicolò, suspended on a rock promontory at the top of the hill, played the church where Michael Corleone married Apollonia. Bar Vitelli, the bar of Maria Vitelli in the lower piazza, is the bar where Michael asks Apollonia's father permission to court his daughter, still functioning fifty years later.